Lack of interest Increase the character count for profile posts

[RobinHood]

Shia Labeouf and I were trying to put together a nice little post to compliment you guys on some of the lovely improvements on the profile page, only to be met with an arresting error that felt like it was encouraging me to give up and smoke a doobie instead to help me reduce my character count.



This limit feels rather arbitrary, and now that we've got a much more full fat editor, I think this limit should be drastically increased so as not to frustrate users at not being able to post longer forms of discussion away from threads on profile posts.

 

[Chris D]

It's already a configurable value.

Are you proposing we change the default, or are you proposing we increase the limit here, or did you not realise it was configurable?

 

[Ozzy47]

This has been suggested before, https://xenforo.com/community/threads/profile-post-character-limit.80933/

 

[RobinHood]

I think change the default I guess, I'm sure I already upped it on my site long ago.

I think I've experienced it here before and it is incredibly annoying getting an error like that. Took me ages longer than it should have to write that post, and it was only because I cared enough to bother to try and whittle it down to below the 420 character limit. Seems like an unnecessary hindrance to posting and is more likely to discourage activity by having users give up if they can't be arsed to edit their post down to fit within the limit.

 

[RobinHood]

This is still at 420 characters on here. I just went to post a profile post with a few sentences that don't deserve their own thread, the content was only really suitable for profile post activity on the site and, yet I couldn't do it because of this ridiculous limitation.

I don't really understand why this doesn't have the same limit as normal posts and is set to such a small minimum as default in the software?

The way it's set up now only discourages larger posts, and users speaking their mind and random thoughts out loud among the communities they're members of. Especially when many users are conditioned to expressing thoughts through profile posts on other platforms.

You've done amazing work improving the profile posts page and improving the ability to create richer and more engaging profile posts and threads with 2.1, why are you limiting what they can say with an arbitrary character count? (Which will probably result in a lot of content to be lost or not posted at all on default installs, because the error frustrates users and they bounce)

 

[Chris D]

It's currently set at the default software value. Your comments have been noted and the suggestion is valid. If anything changes, we'll comment.

 

[RobinHood]

Fair play, it's all good - only posted again because I encountered the issue again. Not intended as a badgering or anything. Just frustrating when the profile post that caused it was pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and positive. I can see it being an issue on default installs that roll out over large communities where users feel they can post content to their profile that is as long form and as rich as that posted to threads.